Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Tools and their Use

This past Monday I decided to poke around Linked-in and find people that I knew that I hadn't connected with. I sent out more than 20 link up requests. What I thought was interesting is that a good half dozen or so wrote me back and say "Hey how are you doing. I was wondering what you were up to." Now I'm in Linked-in by the name they all know me by, (with a couple of exceptions of people who knew me by my maiden name) and I'm the only one in Linked-in by that name, yet we hadn't made contact even with all the "Here are people you've worked with" features of Linked-in.

It just made me think, how well do we really use these social networking tools?
Are we using them to their potential, and do we see their potential? Of course, I must admit it wasn't until Monday that I actually went through my address book and added people in. Perhaps my playing with social networks has increased the value that I see in them. So what is a network worth to you?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

"Social networks" provide meaning insofar that action or learning of substance results from the interactions.

Linkedin's career approach can easily morph into networks of people with similiar interests in social activities, for example Murakami novels or fly-fishing.

More later....

Anonymous said...

Most people aren't even scratching the surface of their potential. To get an idea just how many different ways you can use even just one of these tools (namely LinkedIn), check out Web Worker Daily's 20 ways to use LinkedIn productively. I also did a group blogging project which resulted in a compilation from a couple of dozen bloggers on smart ways to use LinkedIn.

That should give you plenty of ideas for doing more with out and getting more value from it.